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THE STRUGGLE FOR ENERGY SOVEREIGNTY IN PUERTO RICO’S GUBERNATORIAL
ELECTIONS  
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Jaden A. Morales
November 1, 2024
NACLA Reports
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_ Energy and political status are urgent issues for a Puerto Rico
facing the compounding calamities of neoliberal austerity, climate
catastrophes, and energy crisis. _

A field of solar panels in eastern Puerto Rico are damaged following
Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Energy governance is the center of debate
in Puerto Rico's gubernatorial elections, (Flickr/Lorie Shaull/CC BY
2.0)

 

In March 1974, thousands gathered in the Plaza Las Delicias in Ponce,
Puerto Rico. Organized by the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP)
[[link removed]], the event
was to commemorate the abolition of slavery and the 1937 Ponce
massacre, when 19 people were killed as police opened fire on
independence activists protesting the United States’ incarceration
of the Nationalist Party leader, Pedro Albizu Campos. The gathering
also served another purpose: to demand the expropriation of the
Commonwealth Oil Refining Company (CORCO), the archipelago’s largest
refinery at the time.

Addressing people in the plaza, PIP president Rubén Berríos
Martínez spoke of “the new slavery” rooted in colonialism and
capitalism. “In its political form,” Martínez said,
“enslavement is [the process] by which decisions are made in the
United States, even though they adversely affect us here in Puerto
Rico, as is the case now with oil.” Víctor Guillermo Fernández,
then president of the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union
(UTIER), emphasized the government’s lack of power to halt CORCO’s
continuous oil price increases, which caused “inflated electricity
bills.” Connecting the energy crisis to Puerto Rico’s colonial
status, Fernández called for the need to “unmask” the local
government. “The rich are the ones that support the parties in power
and that is why the parties are committed to the rich and not the
working class.”

Fifty years later, Martínez and Fernández’s observations regarding
the connection between energy governance and the role of U.S.
imperialism and Puerto Rican elites in preserving and exploiting
Puerto Rico’s lack of sovereignty continue to resonate.
Environmental struggles against fossil fuel energy and foreign
privatization remain entangled with the political struggle over
self-determination and the legacies of racial slavery.
[[link removed]] Today,
these debates have taken center stage in Puerto Rico’s 2024
gubernatorial election.

Energy and political status are urgent issues for a Puerto Rico facing
the compounding calamities of neoliberal austerity, climate
catastrophes, and energy crisis. In the gubernatorial race, one
emergent political force appears to offer an alternative to the status
quo. La Alianza
[[link removed]], a new
left-wing electoral coalition between the PIP and the Citizens’
Victory Movement (MVC), has fractured the duopoly held for over half a
century by the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PPD) and the
pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP). The pro-decolonization
alliance thus poses a threat to U.S. imperialism
[[link removed]] and
political elites’ colonial stronghold over the archipelago.

According to a recent poll
[[link removed]] by _El
Vocero_, La Alianza candidate Juan Dalmau is in second place with 29
percent of the vote, while the PNP candidate Jenniffer
González-Colón is leading with 31 percent and PPD candidate Jesús
Manuel Ortíz is in third with 18 percent. Dalmau presents the only
comprehensive plan for building a just and sustainable public energy
future.

POLITICAL DISENCHANTMENT AND ENERGY CRISES IN THE AFTERMATH OF
DISASTER

[FOLLOWING HURRICANE MARIA, A POWER LINE BECOMES DAMAGED IN BAYAMON,
PUERTO RICO. (FLICKR/JEFF MILLER/CC BY 2.0)]

FOLLOWING HURRICANE MARIA, A POWER LINE BECOMES DAMAGED IN BAYAMON,
PUERTO RICO. (FLICKR/JEFF MILLER/CC BY 2.0)

In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and María in September 2017, Puerto
Rico’s archaic energy infrastructure was left totally devastated.
Although UTIER workers toiled around the clock to restore power and
local communities pioneered their own solar energy initiatives, the
blackout persisted for 11 months. It was one of the longest and
deadliest blackouts in U.S. history
[[link removed]].

The post-hurricane catastrophe catalyzed discussions about the
critical need for more resilient and renewable energy infrastructure.
Yet, since then, privatization has deepened the archipelago’s
dependence on fossil fuel energy. In 2018, former PNP governor Ricardo
Rosselló announced plans to privatize the state-owned Puerto Rico
Electric Power Authority (PREPA). After backdoor dealings
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PPD and PNP officials, Puerto Rico handed control over the power
transmission and distribution to the U.S.-Canadian LUMA Energy in June
2021. Two years later, in July 2023, Genera PR, a subsidiary
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the New York-based New Fortress Energy, was contracted to manage,
maintain, and decommission PREPA.

Any promise that privatization would supply cheaper and more reliable
services was never realized. Even as 43 percent of Puerto Rico’s
population lives below the poverty line, residents and small
businesses pay nearly twice as much for electricity
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population and continue to experience chronic outages.

The cascading consequences of neoliberal abandonment and
austerity—including a failing healthcare system, public school
closures, and gentrification and displacement—in the aftermath of
the hurricanes have sparked widespread discontent with the PNP and
PPD’s failed economic and political promises built on commonwealth
status and fleeting aspirations for statehood. This heightened
disenchantment, as Yarimar Bonilla describes
[[link removed]], has mobilized efforts
to upend and reimagine a future outside the ceaseless crisis of
colonial capitalism and postcolonial sovereignty. Now, aspirations to
overturn the PPD/PNP duopoly and their longstanding efforts to
liquidate the archipelago’s human and environmental resources
permeate the upcoming election.

FOSSILIZING A DISASTROUS ENERGY NON-FUTURE

As junior partners to the U.S. empire and in allegiance with foreign
capitalists, PNP and PPD elites have relied on energy as a crucial
site to consolidate political and economic power. The PNP’s
­González-Colón and PPD’s Ortíz are harnessing the energy crisis
to secure votes. At the PNP General Assembly in September,
González-Colón joined Dalmau and Ortíz’s calls to dissolve the
contracts with LUMA Energy—a shift from her proposal to appoint a
“czar” to oversee the corporation a month prior. Yet both
González-Colón’s and Ortiz’s plan to resolve the energy crisis
is simply to replace LUMA with another private operator.

Throughout her term as resident commissioner
[[link removed].]—Puerto
Rico’s non-voting representative in the U.S. House of
Representatives—González-Colón has been a staunch supporter of
using methane gas to fuel the archipelago’s electricity. In 2018,
she proudly stood beside Republican representative Rob Bishop, then
chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, as he relayed his
plan to expand methane gas to transform Puerto Rico into “the energy
hub of the entire Caribbean area
[[link removed]].”
This began to come to fruition when the U.S. supply chain company
Crowley inaugurated a methane gas loading terminal in Peñuelas,
Puerto Rico, in May 2022. González-Colón stated
[[link removed]] the
terminal would boost the use of so-called transition fuels, such as
methane gas. According to a 2021 report by the United Nations
Environment Programme and Climate and Clean Air Coalition, however,
over a 20-year period, methane gas is “80 times more potent at
[global] warming than carbon dioxide
[[link removed]].”

González-Colón’s bid, in league with LUMA and Genera PR, to expand
the use of methane gas undermines the 2019 Puerto Rico Energy Public
Policy Act, which mandated Puerto Rico receive 40 percent of its
electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025 and 100 percent by
2050. In short, methane gas expansion threatens Puerto Rico’s
renewable energy future.
[[link removed]] González-Colón’s
campaign donors include Puerto Rico’s largest architecture firm
Álvarez-Díaz & Villalón, contractors of the luxury tourist
development Esencia in Cabo Rojo. This megaproject has received $497
million in tax exemptions from the Puerto Rico Tourism Company,
including 100 percent in tax exemption on fossil fuels.
[[link removed]] Such
financial incentives encourage these entities’ use of oil and
hydrocarbon fuels like methane gas.

Despite a 2020 U.S. Department of Energy study
[[link removed]] concluding that Puerto
Rico could hypothetically meet 100 percent of its energy needs through
rooftop solar panels, González-Colón has urged the U.S. secretary
of energy to stop promoting solar initiatives.
[[link removed]] Ortíz
proposes to support large-scale renewable energy projects and locally
based micro-grid renewable energy cooperatives. However, his
commitment to private utility corporations guarantees a profit-driven
energy system heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Private large-scale
solar farms in the southern coast of the main island have already
proven to be detrimental, destroying arable farm land
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communities
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González-Colón’s and Ortíz’s energy proposals would enable
local and foreign elites to continue to financially exploit Puerto
Rico’s lack of sovereignty. Local elites have historically
benefited from the colonial economy through speculative finance and
real estate development. Through the privatization of public assets,
like PREPA, and tax-incentive programs to attract foreign investment,
these elites continue to secure and accumulate their wealth.
González-Colón and Ortíz’s platforms may appear to acquiesce to
demands to end the contract with LUMA and create a clean energy
future. However, both intend to double down on the foreign
privatization of energy in ways that will escalate environmental harm
and intensify the prevalence and magnitude of climate disasters.

GENERATING A SUSTAINABLE PUBLIC ENERGY FUTURE

La Alianza’s candidate, Dalmau, offers the most
comprehensive vision
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restore public control over Puerto Rico’s energy, promote a reliable
and renewable energy transition, and address the political corruption
and debt accumulation that helped facilitate the current energy
crisis. The core feature of his proposal is the adoption of the
self-sufficient and sustainable solar energy development plan laid out
by Queremos Sol [[link removed]], a multi-sector
coalition of scientific, labor, and environmental organizations
working toward enhancing rooftop solar energy and an accelerated
withdrawal of fossil fuels-based generation.

Dalmau’s plan begins with the immediate cancellation of the
contracts with LUMA and Genera PR and a transition toward a reformed
public energy system. To avoid corruption and political proselytism,
PREPA would be refashioned into an independent entity—with a Board
of Directors composed of scientific and economic experts,
representatives of environmental and small business organizations,
labor unions, and consumers—so energy governance reflects
residents’ needs. Although the PIP is committed to the promoting
independence, La Alianza supports the establishment of a National
Assembly of Status to formulate, then negotiate with U.S. Congress,
the transition processes for independence, statehood, and free
association. This is followed by an extensive educational campaign on
the options and a binding referendum, where Puerto Ricans will decide
on the archipelago’s political future.

Threatened by the rapidly growing support for Dalmau and independence
among younger voters, the PPD and PNP have engaged in voter
disenfranchisement tactics. In September—despite the State
Elections Commission’s defective online registration system, limited
in-person registration options, severe backlogs, and frequent power
outages [[link removed]]—members of the PPD and
PNP voted against La Alianza’s request to extend the voter
registration deadline. The U.S. District Court for the District of
Puerto Rico then denied a legal request for an extended deadline,
filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The same week
voter registration came to a close, the Center for Investigative
Journalism uncovered a two-decades-long vote-stealing scheme
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by the PPD and PNP.

Fifty years have passed since the PIP’s gathering in Plaza Las
Delicias, but the struggles over energy sovereignty and
self-determination remain intertwined. In this unprecedented 2024
gubernatorial election, La Alianza offers an opportunity to upend
elites’ political stronghold and usher in a just, dependable, and
sustainable public energy future.

_JADEN A. MORALES is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of American
Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Their
current research is a visual and environmental history of energy,
racial capitalism, and non-sovereign statecraft in Puerto Rico and the
diaspora._

_The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an
independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and
critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military
intervention in the Western hemisphere. In an evolving political and
media landscape, we continue to work toward a world in which the
nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from
oppression, injustice, and economic and political
subordination.  Our mission is guided by our organizational values.
NACLA offers a forum for debate among a range of voices and
perspectives on the Left. As we enter our sixth decade, we maintain an
editorial focus on issues related to political economy, race and
indigeneity, gender/sexuality, and climate and the environment. NACLA
also provides a platform for voices from the region, and has made a
commitment to emphasize Black, Indigenous, Latinx, LGBTQI+, and
feminist perspectives._

* Puerto Rico
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* Puerto Rican independence
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* Climate Change
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* elections
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